Wednesday, March 20, 2013

The Complete List of Whiskey Blogs

Like most lazy writers, I love a list. There's something satisfying about listing things, especially when there are a lot of them. I've been thinking, for a while, whether it would be possible (not to mention advisable), to list every whiskey blog. It feels like there are hundreds of them; some pop up for a month or two and others (like mine) rattle on, seemingly in perpetuity. Well, I decided to try it, so I present to you: The Complete List of Whiskey Blogs.

Well, it's not actually complete, not even close probably, but it's a start. To start with, I limited myself to English language blogs. Unfortunately, I'm not competent in any other languages, and it would be pretty tough for me to figure out if a blog in Armenian or Hindi was about whiskey, so I figured I'd stick to what I know.

I tried to be pretty liberal with my definition of "blog," but I did exclude sites that were more databases or forums. A blog has to have regular updates with content. In categorizing blogs as "whiskey blogs," I used a loose definition of any blog that was mostly about whiskey. I excluded general spirits blogs and cocktail blogs (unless they were really mostly about whiskey).

I divided the list into four sections: (1) general whiskey blogs; (2) blogs by distillers and whiskey producers; (3) blogs by retailers or bars; and (4) dormant blogs. I defined dormant blogs as blogs that hadn't posted for quite a while (at least eight or nine months) and seemed inactive. They can, of course, always come back.

Overall, I found 174 active whiskey blogs and another 51 dormant whiskey blogs. I'm sure I missed many, especially in the retailer/distillery areas, as many of them seem to have blogs that they post to only occasionally.

I'm sure the number of blogs is an interesting measure of something, but I'm not quite sure what.

I'm going to try to keep the list current, and I'd appreciate any feedback with blogs I missed (and apologies to anyone I left off).